News

→ Our YouTube site is becoming the go-to place for a front-row view of immune cells in action. Below are links to our video playlists:

Human neutrophils in action

Signaling in immune cells: A cross-disciplinary view

Recognition of bacteria and fungi by individual immune cells

Nanomechanics of biomolecular interactions

Computer simulations of immune cells

→ A combination of three of our videos is featured as Movie 13.5 in the textbook “Molecular Biology of the Cell” (sixth edition).

→ PhD student Emmet Francis adds two more awards and another publication to his record of achievements. Emmet has won a “UC Davis & Humanities Graduate Research Award” as well as an “Achievement Reward for College Scientists (ARCS)”, both for the academic year 2018-2019. Congratulations!

→ All our presenters did a great job at the 2018 Biophysical Society Meeting. From left: PhD student Emmet Francis, Undergraduate senior Zhiyu “Hugh” Xiao, and PhD student Trey Simpson. Enjoying Trey’s poster at the far right is Wesley Wong, a former student and now Harvard professor.

→ Undergraduate student Zhiyu “Hugh” Xiao has secured two travel awards to support his attendance of the 2018 Biophysical Society Meeting, one from the Biophysical Society, and the other from the Undergraduate Research Center of UC Davis. Congratulations!

Hugh will be one of four presenters from our lab at this conference.

→ Congratulations to our graduating seniors! We will miss Julie Zimmer, especially her enthusiasm in the lab. We are looking forward to new scientific discoveries with Emmet Francis as PhD student.

→ Zhiyu “Hugh” Xiao, currently a junior, is awarded a 2017 Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship for his proposal “High-Resolution Imaging of Cell and Molecular Interactions by Reflection Interference Contrast Microscopy”. The fellowship will allow him to purchase and 3D-print hardware needed to advance his project.

Congratulations!

→ We are tremendously proud to learn that Emmet Francis has been announced as the winner of the 2017 M.S. Ghausi Medal. The Ghausi medal is the highest honor awarded each year by the College of Engineering to one outstanding graduating senior.

Emmet’s accolades to date include authorship on two articles published in high-impact journals, one podium talk and one poster presentation at international conferences, a Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship (PUF), and travel awards from the Biophysical Society and the UC Davis Undergraduate Research Center. Congratulations!

→ Two of our 2017 papers explore the sprawling frontier of “immunology beyond immunobiology”. The studies significantly extend our quantitative understanding of immunotaxis – the recruitment of immune cells to sites of infection, trauma, or inflammation.

Volkmar Heinrich, Trey Simpson, and Emmet Francis publish an in-depth analysis of chemoattractant gradients, presenting a valuable, ready-to-use mathematical resource for every researcher studying chemotaxis. The study appears in Frontiers in Immunology, the “#1 most cited and #1 largest open-access journal in immunology”.

→ Our undergraduate researchers Emmet Francis, Julie Zimmer, and Zhiyu “Hugh” Xiao do a great job presenting their projects at the 2017 Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Conference of UC Davis. [Click thumbnail at the right for a larger picture.]

→ Undergraduate student Emmet Francis, currently a junior, is awarded a 2016 Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship for his proposal “A relationship between cytoskeletal remodeling and calcium bursts in human neutrophils”. This award continues an impressive streak of excellent achievements by our undergraduates!

→ Undergraduate student Zhiyu “Hugh” Xiao receives the prestigious Mertens Sophomore Award of 2016. This award is presented annually to one outstanding sophomore student (selected from currently ~4,800 sophomores of UC Davis) in recognition of high scholastic achievement by the Phi-Kappa-Phi honor society. Congratulations!

→ Our research is showcased in three well-received presentations at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society. As one of the youngest podium speakers, undergraduate student Emmet Francis gives a talk about calcium bursts in human white blood cells. Graduate student Trey Simpson presents a poster about a new method to quantify binding kinetics at the surface of laser-trapped particles.

→ Cheng-Yuk Lee, Christine Hastey, and Volkmar Heinrich, in collaboration with the group of George R. Thompson III (Dept. of Medical Microbiology and Immunology and Dept. of Internal Medicine), publish the results of an 8-year, interdisciplinary study of the recognition of the pathogenic fungus Coccidioides posadasii (cause of Valley fever) by human neutrophils in PLoS One. The study presents an unusual amount of new methodology, concepts, results, and mechanistic insight. For example:

By examining human immune cells, it preempts mounting doubts of how well animal studies carry over to human hosts, and tackles knowledge gaps left by the fact that human cells cannot be cultured or genetically manipulated.

It examines mechanisms of chemotaxis, adhesion, and phagocytosis in an integrative manner.

This integrative approach is applied to 7 different targets, including 5 pathogenic fungi, under otherwise identical conditions, allowing us to discriminate and rank fungal pathogens in terms of their aptitude to evade recognition.

→ Graduate student Trey Simpson (left) wins a “Best Poster Presentation” award at the 4th annual BME Graduate Group Research Day (2015). Trey also receives a BME Graduate Group Travel Award to present his research at the 2015 UC Bioengineering Symposium.

→ Action movies starring human white blood cells that chase down and neutralize Salmonella bacteria are part of an instructional video on our YouTube channel. [Click thumbnail at the right to play the YouTube movie in a separate window.]

→ Cheng-Yuk Lee, Chenzhou Yu, Christine Hastey, and Volkmar Heinrich, in collaboration with the group of Andreas Bäumler (Dept. of Medical Microbiology and Immunology), investigated how immune cells recognize Salmonella bacteria from a distance, and how Salmonella Typhi (the cause of typhoid fever) evades this detection. The study was published in PLOS Pathogens (PDF 3912 KB) and highlighted in Nature Reviews Microbiology. It showcases how innovative concepts and approaches developed by bioengineers can provide new insight into the mechanisms of vital cellular behavior, and help us tackle scientific questions that are inaccessible to traditional biological methods.

→ Undergraduate students Dean Pernas and Corey Long present their projects at the 2014 Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Conference of UC Davis.

→ Undergraduate student Corey Long is awarded a Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship for his proposal “The Effect of the Cryptococcus Capsule in Immune Recognition”.

→ Undergraduate student Matthew Halverson, who got his first taste of scientific research as a sophomore in our lab, wins the 2012 Ghausi Medal, the highest honor awarded by the College of Engineering to a graduating senior. Matt also received the 2012 Departmental citation for “Outstanding Academic Achievement”.

→ Chek Ounkomol‘s performance helps secure a prestigious 2-year GREAT training grant sponsored by the UC Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program (BREP, 2008-2010). See also the UC press release.